


You Take the Road, I'll Take the River

by EllieMurasaki



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Awesome_POC, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-07
Updated: 2010-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/EllieMurasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie never learns the whole of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Take the Road, I'll Take the River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Las](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Las/gifts).



> Title from "Luisa's Bones" by Crooked Fingers (we came by the rising of the river).

Every ghost has something important, something she needs to do, something he can't let go of. That's why they're ghosts, not—gone. Whatever it is, it's not the whole of the story, any more than reading Asimov or utterly failing to speak intelligible Mandarin is the whole of Maggie's story.

The security feeds at this school show a black woman, maybe late twenties, appearing in various classrooms at irregular intervals, when nobody physically in any of those rooms sees anything. Maggie cross-references the student schedule database with the woman's appearances, and an eighth-grader, Meghan Freeman, is in the class that meets in that room at that time, every time. Meghan's mother Alicia died in 2007. Alicia was twenty-nine, and the picture on her obituary matches the image on the security video. Maggie helps Spruce mock up a Cherokee purification ritual, because the webcast has to have something to explain Alicia's disappearance and none of them are actually stupid enough to commit a felony on camera, but Maggie spends the whole time wondering if this is the right thing to do. Alicia's never hurt anyone, and what harm does it do to let her go on watching over her daughter?

There's a pattern of disappearances near this mine: a group of two or three young white men, usually teenagers daring each other, go in, and two of them don't come out. The survivors' stories are given enough credibility that the police scour the area for the missing and their kidnapper, and later for the dead and their killer, and when the latest version of the rumor gets out, the town's Latino population is made more miserable than usual for a few weeks or until the rumor slips the minds of the rest of the town. Maggie looks up the records of all the missing persons in the county, and the pattern begins about fifty years back. There's a disappearance several months before the pattern begins that doesn't fit the pattern but does match the description of the woman the survivors all say they saw, and asking around nets the information that everybody knew who killed Luisa Gonzalez but nobody with a badge ever gave a damn. Ambyr won't shut up about what a bad person she is to be kidnapping Caleb Marshall, age seventy-two, out of his peaceful retirement—for values of 'peace' that, if the gods are gracious, include guilt over the young woman that he and his buddies assaulted and murdered, but Maggie suspects the gods are not gracious. Ambyr's stuck, though, because Ed and Harry are young white men and nobody's sure whether Luisa will think Spruce is a white man and Maggie's not about to do the manhandling and the gravedigging all on her own. Maggie can't give Luisa justice, but (if Luisa recognizes Marshall, and if that happens then Maggie will be very sad, she's sure) she can give Luisa revenge, and (either way) she can give Luisa peace.

There's a book Maggie read once. The title character made it his life's work to tell the stories of the dead, the way those people would have told them.

Maggie doesn't speak for the dead. She learns the key themes and the climactic moments of their stories, and she usually tells what she knows of their stories, but her task is to write their epitaphs—their epilogues.


End file.
